Definition
A Latin term from medieval legal and ecclesiastical records meaning "to pay." Used in old English and continental records to denote the act of payment or the discharge of a financial obligation. Closely associated with the noun form pacatio, meaning "payment," which appears in similar contexts. PACARE is not a term of art in modern law but survives as a research term encountered in Latin documents, monastic records, and medieval legal instruments.
Common Confusion
PACARE and PACTUM are related only in that Burrill groups them together for alphabetical convenience. PACARE means to pay; PACTUM means an agreement or compact. The two should not be conflated. Separately, PACATIO (payment, the noun derived from PACARE) should be distinguished from PACTIO (a compact or bargain, derived from PACTUM). In Latin documents the visual similarity of these forms can cause misreading; context — particularly whether the surrounding language concerns the discharge of a sum or the formation of an agreement — is the reliable differentiator.
Why It Matters in Research
PACARE appears almost exclusively in Latin manuscript sources — monastic charters, royal accounts, and similar medieval records — rather than in common law pleading or treatise literature. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus are most likely to encounter it when reading primary documents from the Anglo-Norman or early common law period rather than in reported cases or digests. The associated noun PACATIO carries the same meaning and may appear independently; treat both as signals of a payment or discharge clause in the surrounding instrument. Because these terms drop out of legal usage as English-language instruments displaced Latin ones, they are absent from modern legal dictionaries and will not be indexed under familiar English-language payment terms. Searching for PACARE or PACATIO in the corpus is a targeted exercise for document-level Latin research, not a doctrinal research path.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence provide a minimal entry — "to pay" — with no elaboration, treating PACARE as a simple translation gloss. Burrill's Law Dictionary is marginally more useful, supplying two source references: Monasticon Anglicanum (volume 1, page 384) for PACARE and Matthew Paris (writing around 1248) for PACATIO, with Cowell cited as an intermediary authority. This chain of citation — medieval chronicle to antiquarian glossary to legal dictionary — is characteristic of how Latin record-terms reached nineteenth-century reference works. Burrill also folds PACT into the same entry, using PACARE as a bridge to introduce the Latin pactum, but the two concepts are distinct: PACARE concerns the mechanics of payment, while PACTUM concerns agreement. Historical dictionaries do not further develop the term, and no treatise literature elaborates on it as a doctrinal concept. Researchers should weight Burrill's source citations as genuine leads to primary materials rather than as legal authority.
Jurisdictional Note
PACARE is not a term of current law in any common law jurisdiction. Its relevance is limited to historical document research, principally in English ecclesiastical and monastic records and in sources derived from medieval continental practice.